It’s been a quite some time since Twitter introduced any changes and on Friday they started rolling out three significant ones.
Firstly, there’s been a major redesign of twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com and most people in the UK now have #newnewtwitter as it’s being referred to on Twitter. Mobile phone apps on Android and iPhone have also been updated and other apps such as the iPad app will be updated by the end of the year. On twitter.com there is a fresh new look including two new tabs; Connect and Discover. Under Connect you can see who has messaged, mentioned you, followed you or retweeted or favorited one of your tweets. It’s really a souped up version of the previous Mentions column. More radical is the new Discover tab which under Stories provides information reflecting your interests. It’s based on your location, who you follow and what stories are being tweeted about. Under Activity you can see the following, favouriting and listing activity of your Friends or people that you follow.
Secondly embedded tweets now make it easier to add a tweet with full functionality eg reply etc to your website. See example below.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/intranetfuture/statuses/146107027473698817″]
On any tweet (select Details to view permalink to tweet) select the Embed link and this will give you the code you need for your website. If you’re unsure about how to do this speak to your web developer.
Thirdly, brand pages have been rolled out to 21 big brands including @Heineken with a wider rollout (it’s unclear what this means) to follow. As you can see from the Heineken example, a brand page displays a banner image at the top of the page as well as a ‘promoted tweet’ with an auto-expanding photo or videos which sits at the top of the profile.